For my second installment of Not-Quite-Retro-Gaming-Month™, I was going to reinstall and play Gothic, a medieval RPG that I thought was a major bore back in the day (but which a friend thought was quite fun), but I really wasn’t in the mood to install and slog through an RPG just yet.

Yeah, I know – March was Retro Gaming Month. Well, excuse me for not having posting privileges then.
And now it’s time to feeeeel the flaaaames!
Ahem. What I mean is, I think I’m one of the only people on Earth (along with Sparse) who didn’t like Freedom Force when it came out.

This time it’s for real! Doom 3, the long-awaited third installment in id Software’s hallowed Doom series of PC games, has finally landed. I admit I haven’t posted here in quite a few days because, well, I’ve been busy playing it, among other things I’ve been tied up with.

Back in 1993 I remember buying a Super Nintendo game and excitedly reading the manual in the car on the way home. That game was Star Fox. One of the forgotten classics produced for the SNES, Star Fox has, in my opinion, the absolute best soundtrack of any game released on that platform, period.

My friends will tell you that I’m not much for medieval PC RPGs like Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind. I’m more of a mainstream FPS gamer who likes your run-of-the-mill Dooms, Half-Lives, and all that other crap. But even I can get into a good medieval RPG if it’s accessible enough, and that’s where Sacred comes in.

The second installment in my impromptu Retro Gaming Month commentary features Blood II: The Chosen, one of the premiere games running on Monolith Productions’ brand-new LithTech Technology in 1998. The first game I remember playing from this development team was Blood, the original, in approximately 1996 sometime.

By my own spur-of-the-moment declaration, March is Retro Gaming Month! Since every lame, pointless organization needs their own “official wipe your mouth month” or “official kick the refrigerator” month or whatever else, I figure, why not? The calendar’s plenty cluttered up as it is, and yet I don’t care!

Given that it was the first 100% worry-free weekend I’ve had in quite a while, I spent most of my time goofing off. I mean, what else would one do, having been suddenly freed from responsibility? Oh yes. Game time. So I spent most of Friday through Sunday playing Deus Ex: Invisible War, which I initially reviewed here some weeks ago.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I’m forgoing the Xbox/laptop drag-along this Christmas, and relying only on the computers at my parents’ house for gaming entertainment. Since one of these computers is a three-year-old notebook and the other is an eight-year-old Pentium Pro, I decided that the only games I’m going to be playing were games at least as old as these systems.

Despite the deluge of complaints fellow gamers are raining down upon Ion Storm and Warren Spector (of System Shock fame) for fudging up the sequel to one of the best PC games in recent memory, I bought Deus Ex: Invisible War yesterday.